It is a matter that unleashes passions. Since December 4, and the particularly chilling assassination of Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthCare in the streets of New York, social networks have been teeming with fake news and conspiracy theories around the personality of the alleged shooter, Luigi Mangione.
The most recent of them: the 26-year-old young man allegedly killed himself in prison last week. The information, which was widely shared on X, comes from a very real notification sent to many iPhone owners by the British news channel, the BBC. However, this is fake news.
FAKE OFF
Late last week, many iPhones received the following notification from BBC News: “Luigi Mangione shoots himself; a Syrian mother hopes Assad will pay the price; South Korean police raid Yoon Suk Yeol's office. Enough to put a piece back into the crazy rumor machine that this affair has embodied for two weeks.
However, this notification which was generated by “Apple Intelligence”, the brand new artificial intelligence (AI) tool launched by Apple is completely false. The principle of this new functionality launched this week in the United Kingdom? A language model that sorts, reads, and summarizes notifications from iPhone users. It is therefore “Apple Intelligence” and he alone who invented this news. This is what we call, in AI language, a hallucination.
Crazy rumors
The BBC group very quickly spoke out on the subject and indicated this Friday that it was in no way responsible for the fake news. “BBC News is the most trusted news outlet in the world. It is essential for us that our audience can trust every piece of information or article published on our behalf, and this includes notifications,” a BBC spokesperson told Agence France Presse (AFP). The news channel also confirmed that it had expressed its dissatisfaction to the American tech giant.
More articles from the Fake OFF service
This is not the first time that a false rumor has spread about the case of Luigi Mangione. Many of them take direct root in online conspiracy circles. We think in particular of the famous theory of 286, according to which everything in the history of the alleged shooter would always bring him back to this number which would also be a “refusal code” in the insurance protocol. But also that of the unibrow which would completely exonerate Luigi Mangione on the basis of a photograph in which the young man appears less hairy. Or finally that of Monopoly, which claims that the accused would have conducted a treasure hunt with the investigators according to the same “rules” as those of the famous board game. All of them are fantasy, as the shell casings and fingerprints found at the crime scene do indeed lead back to Luigi Mangione.
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